Rocks Class, we honor you...

... for being articulate.

Field Trip to Stevens Park

You use many languages to express your thoughts clearly. As we follow the Reggio-Emilia approach at The Nest we talk about the 100 languages of children. It has been a delight to see our class communicate through speech, gestures, drawing, writing, singing, playing, and touch. In the Rocks Class, this year we added English, Spanish, and Polish to those languages. The children easily and effectively speak to each other. Their affection and concern for each other is evident in every one of these languages.

Last day indoor picnic

 “No way. The hundred is there.”
by Loris Malaguzzi. Translated by Lella Gandini

The child is made of one hundred.

The child has
a hundred languages
a hundred hands
a hundred thoughts
a hundred ways of thinking
of playing, of speaking.

A hundred.

Always a hundred
ways of listening
of marveling, of loving
a hundred joys
for singing and understanding
a hundred worlds
to discover
a hundred worlds
to invent
a hundred worlds
to dream.

The child has
a hundred languages
(and a hundred hundred hundred more)
but they steal ninety-nine.
The school and the culture
separate the head from the body.
They tell the child:
to think without hands
to do without head
to listen and not to speak
to understand without joy
to love and to marvel
only at Easter and at Christmas.

They tell the child:
to discover the world already there
and of the hundred
they steal ninety-nine.

They tell the child:
that work and play
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
sky and earth
reason and dream
are things
that do not belong together.

And thus they tell the child
that the hundred is not there.
The child says:
No way. The hundred is there.